It's difficult to get soldiers to fire on their countrymen. It's one thing to demonize the Krauts, Japs, Nips, Gooks and Russkis. Soldiers dehumanize their enemies with these kinds of epithets. If the person at the end of your rifle is from one town over from you, it's hard to think of them as anything other than your countrymen.

Besides, Iraqi and Afghan insurgents are not as well armed at the average American but they're giving the US war machine a hell of a difficult time.

LK

No. Not only a sick, sick fuck. Also, someone who's sick of seeing criminals rob, rape and murder with no consequence.

LK

They're not LaPierre's, they're John Lott's. John Lott came to the debate as a Northeastern Liberal-type who wanted to prove how gun control made people safer. To his credit, when the numbers didn't confirm his suspected result, he changed his view.

LK

Are you telling me to expect problems with SAP?

A few (dozen?) years back a chemistry prof was writing the lab manuals and wanted to change "protective gloves" to "protective clothing". He did a find and replace gloves with clothing.

Various lab instructions included the phrase "It is not necessary to wear clothing in this lab".

Hilarity ensued.

That's not a bad idea. P=M/A, so if we dump billions of tons of CO2 into the air to increase the mass of the atmosphere, the pressure will naturally increase. Brilliant!

Increased odds doesn't mean something *will* happen, just that it's more likely to happen. Wearing a seatbelt increases your odds of surviving an accident. That doesn't mean people who wear seatbelts will always live, nor that people who don't will always die. The seatbelt wearers are simply more likely to survive.

Seven events where outcomes are random (or at least chaotic) are not sufficient to extrapolate whether predictions were correct or not. One hundred years may not be enough. In traffic, there are tens of thousands of events from which to gather data in a given year. Not so much for hurricanes. Just because storm intensity and/or count hasn't increased in the years we've seen doesn't mean it won't. Nor does it mean that it will. But the prudent course is to err on the side of caution.

So we push some glaciers into the ocean to cool it off. Problem solved!

Yes, that's the old way of doing it. Back in the day, mostly before radar became common (and radar detectors banned in Virginia) they would watch from the air and time how long it took a car to get from one point to the next and then radio the vehicle to units on the ground. That's why you see seemingly random white lines across the highway. Probably save a couple bucks by removing the signs and not painting the new lines.

Virginia is probably the worst state in the union to drive in. But it's all in the name of safety, right? At least their draconian enforcement measures have eliminated speeding and accidents, so there's that. Oh wait, I'm thinking of their draconian penalties for possession of marijuana. Oh wait, not cannabis; I meant moonshine. Ok, ok, I'll stop. Your turn, Virginia.

Why bother? They're well within reach.